


never take the stars away from me

by flightofwonder



Series: i love the way you see the world [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character of Faith, Deaf Character, Introspection, Islam, M/M, the start of my Yusuf is deaf au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:14:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25534930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightofwonder/pseuds/flightofwonder
Summary: But sometimes, when the world was dark and cold and Nicolò was the only light, he would ask him to sing. Laying his head on his chest, Yusuf pressed the pads of his fingers against the hollow of Nicolò’s throat, gentle as a bird’s wing, and closed his eyes. The vibrations brought him home, as the pulsating prayers that shook marble once did, all those lifetimes ago.(Deaf!Yusuf AU intro)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: i love the way you see the world [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1864540
Comments: 63
Kudos: 560





	never take the stars away from me

Once, thousands of lifetimes ago, there was a boy who prayed in a mosque. He stood still and reserved, repeated the reverent motions of his family around him, and spoke words of prayer from his mouth that was lost to his ears.

Yusuf was not the most attentive child. He would lose interest in watching the Imam guide the _ja’amah_ through teachings and readings that he couldn’t begin to decipher from his lips, and eyes would wander. They would get lost in the majesty surrounding him, this holy place of prayer made in Allah’s name, the geometric alignments and carefully picked pigments, a million pieces brought together in a unified whole that managed to steal his breath away, no matter that he had been coming here since before he could remember

 _A perfect masterpiece_ , he once thought, but his mother informed him that the artists who built this building purposefully left a piece out of place, for no one was perfect but Allah. Yusuf would peer at the domes above him, seeking out the imperfection like a game – or rather, like a quest. He never understood why he was compelled, as certainly none of the other worshipers were. Perhaps his young mind struggled to believe that human hands created the glorious architecture he stood in every week. He would lose himself in the multitudes of patterns for minutes at a time, trying to find that one piece that indicated the separation between man and Allah’s creation. 

He would be lost in his thoughts until his brother tugged on his sleeve, indicating for them to kneel and bringing himself back to the worship at hand. Abashed by his lack of focus (that he would certainly get a scolding for later) Yusuf pressed his forehead to the ground and closed his eyes. As the _salat_ rang out through the building, so loud and purposeful, he could feel the marble under his fingertips tremble.

He had never needed to hear the prayers, only to feel them. He trusted in Allah to guide him with the rest.

* * *

Once, Booker had asked him if he wished he could hear his lover’s voice.

He supposed he did, in a sense. There was still that spark of curiosity Yusuf felt when he watched Nicolò’s lips move, which was rare. The most he saw anyone in their family speaking was when they were translating him with a stranger, a task that fell largely to Nicolò besides. But he tried not to take it as a loss, as he did with most things when it came to his lack of hearing. Allah shaped him this way for a purpose. _In everything there is a sign that indicates that He is One_ – words that still lingered in his mind long after reading them in their calligraphed beauty almost a millennia ago.

Being made this way meant he could never hear Nicolò’s voice, that was true, but it was also true that Yusuf barely considered it. Not when his eyes could still see the way Nicolò moved.

It wasn’t easy between them, even when they finally stopped killing each other. Yusuf got by with gestures as he had with his family, and thankfully, after much back and forth, the two finally shared a few of them as common ground. It frustrated Yusuf as it always did when he did not have paper and ink to get his thoughts across, but it wouldn’t have helped anything with this Genoese man, anyway. But despite the odds, they shared enough exaggerated points and nods to survive through the desert to the first sign of civilization.

It would be a decade before the two of them could communicate fluently. In what language, though, neither of them could say. It was born from days and days leaned over various pieces of parchment with writing inaccessible to one of them or the other, drawing crude figures in the sand and repeating motions with their hands. Nicolò was so reserved about speaking with these silent gestures at first, almost embarrassed, which drove a wedge between the two of them for a few days. In time, Nicolò explained he was not ashamed of Yusuf – _“Never”,_ he signed, so genuinely shocked at the idea that Yusuf instantly believed him – but instead struggled when not excelling at whatever task was put in front of him.

Once Yusuf got Nicolò to laugh at the absurdity of the two of them, Yusuf’s chest instantly felt lighter at the sight, watching the other man’s throat move up and down in joyous synchronicity. 

Nicolò got bolder, and their language grew sturdier, a tree with its roots branching out in a myriad of directions. It wasn’t unlike watching a dance, the way Nicolò‘s arms and fingers moved with such smooth precision. He could watch him talk for hours like this, in this language that they had built together, brick by brick. _He is beautiful_ , he thought every time, drinking up every movement like a man starving in the desert.

And that was what ruled Yusuf in the end: beauty. Their skills with death sharpened with each rising of the sun and as they fought through the blood and muck and despair, now side by side instead of enemies, Yusuf struggled to remember what it was like to be the innocent boy who searched for flaws in something created in Allah’s name. Some days, all he could see were imperfections, around him and within him, and it rarely created the unified whole he had been taught to believe in.

 _God has inscribed beauty upon all things_ , the Hadith read. This grew difficult to believe as time marched on and all he could see were horrible men with horrible purposes that it seemed only he and Nicolò, and later Andy and Quynh, then Booker and Nile, could stop. Despite his best efforts, he sometimes lost sight of the unity of the whole for the pieces underneath. So many of the pieces were soaked in blood and hate and depravity. But he refused to relinquish his faith completely.

So, he stopped looking for the whole picture and sought out the pieces he could place, and trusted that Allah would do the work that he couldn’t. It was rarely as simple as it sounded, but he had to believe that even when he was being choked by hopelessness, somewhere, there was still beauty.

Allah had made him, and Allah had made Nicolò, and they were given to each other to make a better whole of the world left in tatters. _God is beautiful, and He loves beauty_ , so Yusuf never stopped seeking it out, no matter how impossible it felt.

He no longer thought of his home’s mosque, now thousands of miles away, but of the beauty at his fingertips. He thoughts of the rising sun and the glittering moon, and of the stars that lived shorter lives than his, but were still in the sky. He thought of how he was born to never hear and yet also never die. And he thought of Nicolò, who matched his every step and who was always right there to make up for whatever Yusuf lacked, with both the deadly and the mundane.

As time passed, despite the violence that seemed to haunt his every step, the world unfurled its wonderful secrets for Yusuf’s eyes. And there were so many of them, Yusuf sometimes felt as if he was drowning, but it would be the best of his deaths, he had no doubt.

In every town, in every city, in every county, splendor was in abundance. All shaped by human hands, with ink or oil or so many new tools that were invented as the centuries went by. No matter how far he roamed, there was always a new combination of color and shape and shades that his eyes had never seen before. There were alphabets that he absorbed like a plant did the sun’s rays, bringing him back to when he was a student in Baghdad, eager to memorize and conceptualize every line. And what a blessing, that art kept changing with the passage of time, always gifting him with creations familiar yet brand new.

Languages were even created and forged in communities by people like him, and Yusuf delighted in it. Eventually, these sign languages would become his new mode of communication, with only a few signs left from his beginnings that would last. Finally, Yusuf could speak to more than just his family of immortals, and the world felt more within reach than it ever had before.

He knew that some of this splendor was still inaccessible to him. Music, for all the written theory that surrounded it, was something he couldn’t experience in the complex way it was made to. Like those calls to prayer from his childhood, he always knew that the heart of it was lost to him, no matter how hard he tried to feel it.

It seemed that Yusuf had two choices: he could rage against Allah about the injustice of it all – and he wouldn’t pretend he never had, not with all these years to spare since his first death – or he could hold what little he could and be grateful. And there had yet to be a time when Nicolò wasn’t swaying in his arms, leading them in a dance to music that only he could hear, with soft-lidded eyes and a smooth brow, that Yusuf hadn’t felt immensely grateful.

Yes, there was still beauty. And there was Nicolò, to whom beauty could never compare. Yusuf had all that he needed to do what he was put on this blessed and cursed earth to do.

But sometimes, when the world was dark and cold and Nicolò was the only light, he would ask him to sing. Laying his head on his chest, Yusuf pressed the pads of his fingers against the hollow of Nicolò’s throat, gentle as a bird’s wing, and closed his eyes. The vibrations brought him home, as the pulsating prayers that shook marble once did, all those lifetimes ago.

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell @ me on tumblr: flightsofwonder


End file.
